Intoxication of our culture

The trend of cultural westernisation of our society has become very pervasive and prevalent, such that Western civilisation has taken precedence over our African values and culture and the latter is regarded as inferior to the former.

The impact of Western civilisation on our culture has occasioned a discontinuity in form of life throughout our communities.

This has led to a cultural dualism that often presents itself as a real dilemma in concrete, real life situations. In other words, the African experience of modernity is fraught with tensions at every level of the communal and social settings.

Westernisation has intoxicated our African cultures and inflicted a cancerous wound on it socially, politically and economically and it’s manifested on every aspect of life in our communities.

Our cultures are cemented on the core principles of giving people a connection to certain social values, beliefs, religions and customs. It allows us to identify with others of similar mindsets and backgrounds.

It provides an automatic sense of unity and belonging within a group and allows us to better understand previous generations and the history of where we come from. Such values includes respect for elderly people, greetings, cultural rituals, sex education, communal work, traditional ceremonies i.e. marriage ceremonies, adulthood initiation ceremonies and leadership inauguration ceremonies as the list goes on.

You have to agree with me that our cultural values and customs are highly contaminated by western cultures in so many ways.

There is no more respect for age; no more respect for values that we held sacrosanct in African societies, the younger ones now find it very difficult to greet elderly ones.

We now have children of single parents, a phenomenon that is identifiable with America. People no longer communalise, nobody wants to be anybody’s brother’s keeper.

Western civilisation has promoted corruption, our leaders now look up to Europe and America as safe havens for looted funds. It is a consequence of Western civilisation.

The conception of sexuality has changed completely; the desire to be like Westerners by our people has suddenly made them promiscuous; doing things that were never imaginable several years ago. Most of our young men and women are being recruited into homosexuality on daily basis, men transforming to become females.

Cultural ideas and values grow and flow across borders unimpeded, but that should not make us lose sight of the fact that the weaker you are; the more likelihood of cultural dominance. We have been very weak and vulnerable since the last century.

We now suffer from level of mental enslavement; cultural imperialism; the need for decolonisation of the mind. The trend of Western civilisation in Africa is pathetic, the strength of wave of Western civilisation is such that we are hardly capable of resisting it. The wave is so strong that it has become irresistible.

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